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Tuesday, 20 May 2014

Warning: This is a longer, grimmer piece than usual, and if
you’re looking for entertainment I’d strongly advise you to skip it! This is
for those who like their history raw…

People are being killed in Ukraine. That’s ‘current
affairs’, of course, and won’t be ‘history’ for at least another twenty years,
but that doesn’t mean historians shouldn’t be studying it very closely indeed.

Because in Ukraine the battleground is history itself – and every
single ethnic group in the country has good historical reasons for hating the
others. Ukrainians hate Russians because of years of oppression under Stalin,
and in particular the atrocity of the Holodomor. Crim-Tatars hate Russians for
displacing them, and particularly for Stalin’s mass deportations in 1944.
Jewish citizens are wary of both Crim-Tatars for their role in the ‘round-up’ of
Jews under the Nazi Occupation, and Ukrainians who participated in Jewish
murders and served as notoriously vicious guards in the concentration camps. Russians
hate both Tatars and Ukrainians for their collaboration with the Nazis, and
resent the fact that the break-up of the Soviet Union left them a stranded
minority in a country full of people who hate them back.

All these grievances are valid - but the problem comes when none seem able to recognize those of the others. Russians, for
instance, were legitimately furious when their traditional Victory Day
parades were banned as ‘pro-Russian rallies’ – but on May 18th the Russian
Federation tried to ban the Crim-Tatars’ own little memorial parade in Crimea
on the grounds that it would be ‘provocative’.

The Tatars went ahead with the commemoration anyway

But Victory Day is the big one – and it was on May 9th that
we saw the biggest split between Ukrainians of different ethnic origin. You
won’t need to speak Russian to understand the reaction of the crowd in this
video, for instance, when at 1” the Ukrainian nationalist governor of Kherson
calls Hitler a ‘liberator’ who saved the country from Stalin:

My personal sympathies are with the woman and old man who wrest
away the microphone – but that’s perhaps
my own historical bias showing, since my country fought alongside the Russians
against Hitler. Such a bias would currently be very dangerous in Ukraine. Even
the traditional symbol of remembrance, the ‘St George ribbon’, marks someone as
a ‘pro-Russian’ and a legitimate target, and those who wear them are known
derisively as ‘Colorado beetles’ after the orange and black of the stripes. This little French video even shows footage from Lviv when 'Right Sector' thugs tear the St George ribbons from veterans' chests as they go to lay flowers on their comrades' graves.

'Colorado beetles' - Resistance Veterans in Sevastopol May 9th 2011

I can’t defend those actions, but I can in a way understand
them. How can those who suffered under Stalin distinguish
between ‘good Russians’, whose Red Army did more than any other to achieve
victory over Hitler, and ‘bad Russians’ who oppressed, tortured and murdered so
many in the dark years of the USSR? Yet both things are true. History isn’t a question of
‘either/or’, but a long procession of ‘and…and’s, and if we show only half the
picture then it’s no longer history, but propaganda.

But there’s a worse kind than that, when history is
deliberately rewritten to support a current agenda. I was first drawn into this
when I read newspaper accounts of Crimean history like this one, which constructed
their entire narrative round the Tatars being displaced by evil Russian
invaders. Say – what?? All these pieces began in the late 13th century,
completely omitting the fact that the ancestors of Russia were already there in
the people of the ‘Kievan Rus’, and it was they who were displaced by the
Tatars in the Mongol Invasion from 1223. Crimea was actually the birthplace of
Russian Orthodox Christianity in the 10th century, and Kiev was the original
capital of Russia.

Vladimir Cathedral in Crimea where Prince Vladimir of Kiev converted to Christianity

Even the later history has been blurred. Very few articles
mentioned that Crimea was only transferred to Ukraine in 1954 as a kind of
‘wedding gift’ by Khrushchev – a gift that might reasonably have been returned
when the break-up of the USSR led to the ‘divorce’ in 1991. None I’ve seen
offer any hint of Crimea’s resistance ever since: of the mass protests of
1993-4 and 2009-2010, or of Ukraine abandoning even the pretence of
independence by removing the pro-Russian President Meshkov, and scrapping the
entire Crimean constitution. Nope, none of that. Nothing to interfere with the
concept that Crimea was always Ukraine’s, and Russia had no right to it at all.

But even more disturbing was this recent blog by the ‘Euromaidan
PR’ which attempted to do away with the earlier history altogether – claiming
Russia had no relation at all to the Kievan-Rus, and had merely hijacked the
concept to justify their invasion in the 17th century. It’s an astonishingly inaccurate
piece of old-style propaganda, but what I couldn’t understand was why they’d
even bother. These events were centuries ago – why couldn’t the Maidan just
leave history as history and move on?

I’m afraid I think I understand it now. The same source on
Twitter actually claimed there were no Russians in Crimea before WW1, but when
I pointed out this would have meant we’d fought the Crimean War of
1853-6 against an opponent who wasn’t even there, a Crim Tatar entered the
conversation as follows:

That word – ‘iatrogenic’. This man didn’t even see the
Russians as people, but as a disease infecting his land. That was why it was
necessary to rewrite the history – to ‘other’ and dehumanize them by portraying
them as ‘aliens’. There are very good reasons for doing that to a particular
ethnic group, and this 22 second video of Ukrainian parliamentary member Iryna
Farion explains them very well:

‘We should have driven the enemy out of Ukraine as early as
1654…. That’s why these alien creatures who have come to Ukraine deserve only
one thing. They need to be killed.’

She’s ostensibly referring to ‘pro-Russian separatists’, but
those last sentences make clear she is talking about every ethnic Russian in
Ukraine.

But we have seen this kind of
dehumanizing before, and that’s another reason why we desperately need a
historian’s perspective on what’s happening. George Santayana famously
said, ‘Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ – and
this is one part of Europe’s past we must never, ever allow to happen again.

And it could do. Even if we look only at the pictures and
iconography it’s impossible for anyone familiar with the 1930s and 1940s to
miss the similarities. Take this poster, for instance. The legend reads ‘Swearing makes you turn into a Moskal’ –
and ‘Moskal’, like ‘Colorado’, is a pejorative term for a Russian. The picture could
have come straight from the pages of Der Stürmer.

So could those images
attached to unverified accounts of atrocities, often involving a very blond
Ukrainian girl with startlingly white skin.This revolting one from the Facebook page of Ukraine’s Right Sector actually dates back to 1945 – as if absolutely
nothing has changed.

Other images are even more familiar, and on a History blog I
doubt I need to comment on these:

There are ‘Nazis’ in Ukraine all right, and in 2012 the Jewish Times was already expressing concern about Svoboda having won seats in
the Ukrainian RADA. They were a dominant force in the Maidan protests, and the
BBC did a good six minute piece about them for Newsnight which you can see
here. This video paints an even stronger picture of what’s happening in Ukraine
today, but I advise against watching the last few minutes where the images are
appallingly graphic.

Of course there’s propaganda here too. Svoboda holds very
few seats, the Right Sector hasn’t even formed an official party, and many
supporters of the Kiev government find them just as repellent as we do. We
could even tell ourselves it’s a lot of fuss about something that’s not much
worse than our own EDL.Or we could have
– until May 2nd and possibly Europe's worst single atrocity since WWII.

Odessa.

I find it difficult to write about this. I was one of about
600,000 people who watched the whole thing happening live, and just thinking
about it still makes me shake. But there’s a survivor’s account in Russian
here with a decent English transcript here, there’s another with
English subtitles here, and two more (slightly sanitized) here. Analyses tend
to be emotionally and sometimes politically charged, but this one gives a clear overview, this one is useful to explain the staging, this one provides good context, and all are well supported by primary sources. Verified
footage and photographs of the whole thing are available all over the net, but
viewer discretion is strongly advised, since the most important evidence is
inevitably inside the charnel house itself.

What I can’t do is link you to Western mainstream media, since all
have refused to cover it. The official story is that there was street fighting in
Odessa provoked by the ‘separatists’, and as a result the House of Trades
Unions ‘caught fire’ and about 39 people ‘died’ in it.

What actually happened is this:

A rally of nationalists and football fans was indeed
provoked to violence when they were fired on by men wearing the red armband
associated with the Right Sector. Some of these also wore the St George’s
ribbon of the ‘separatists’, although they mingled happily with police, and
even fired from behind their protective line. Their efforts succeeded in
drawing a now maddened mob to the House of Trade Unions, where more than 200
ethnic Russian men, women and children had been harmlessly camped since
February. These peaceful protestors were panicked into fleeing inside the
building, which was then deliberately set on fire with Molotov cocktails
prepared by pretty Ukrainian girls much earlier in the day.

The mob watched it burn. When a fire engine tried to get
through they blocked it. When victims fell or jumped to their death from the
windows, they cheered. When desperate faces appeared at the windows they
chanted, ‘Burn, Colorado, burn!’ When some victims tried to escape from lower
floors men in the crowd shot at them. When some made it out through the flames
they were beaten to death with baseball bats and iron bars. It’s all on tape –
and can be verified frame for frame with footage that was streamed live through
four different cameras.

Child looking out at the window. 'Burn, Colorado, burn!'

Even that wasn’t all of it. Killers had already entered the
building, and while the mob chanted outside many Russians were already being
murdered within. Some were shot, others apparently gassed, but bodies were
found with only head and shoulders burnt black, as if they had been doused by
some flammable mixture and set alight. Again, it’s all on tape – much of it recorded
by Right Sector thugs who entered the building afterwards to both rob and mock
the dead.

We don’t know how many died. Only 48 deaths have been
officially recorded so far, but as many again are reported ‘missing’, and survivors
claim there were more still. Even so, it’s not the numbers that are most
shocking, but the way it was done – and the fact ordinary people were so easily
transformed into monsters. It is the inhumanity that makes it so unbearable.

Just one example. In this short clip you hear a woman
screaming inside the burning building, and the crowd comment on it. I’ve had
two people independently verify what the man closest to camera is saying, and
it’s this – ‘That’s not a woman, it’s a separatist’.

‘Dehumanization’ again, and the whole business is riddled
with it. Ukrainian Nationalists have been posting pictures like these on
Twitter and Facebook every day:

Nor is it just the mob. Ukrainian columnist Kateryna Kruk
wrote that ‘Odessa cleaned itself of terrorists’, and presidential candidate
Julia Tymoschenko even congratulated the ‘heroes of Odessa’ for fighting for ‘our
Ukraine’. I have yet to see one single
expression of remorse.

And still the West is silent! The EU statement on the
subject suggests the motive might be to ‘prevent escalation’ – but inevitably
it’s having the opposite effect. Not only have we told every ethnic Russian in
Ukraine that they can be beaten, tortured, and murdered without anyone lifting
a finger to help them, we have also emboldened their murderers. Whatever violence
follows, we will be at least partially responsible.

Which is yet another reason why historians are needed here. When
the media are silent or skewed, then tribalists rush to fill the vacuum, and in
the subsequent ‘info-wars’ it becomes harder and harder to find the truth. ‘Disinformation’
already abounds, such as the fake ‘doctor’ who posted a harrowing tale on
Facebook and was subsequently found not to exist. Mud is also thrown at genuine
sources, so that cries of ‘photoshopped!’ greet the worst stills from Odessa
footage – but the material streamed live could not be faked, and I’m afraid I’ve
been able to match it every time.

We need a historian’s approach. We need calm, common sense
that will look for primary sources, seek to verify everything, and always
remember that people lie to suit their own agenda. Yes, this is ‘current
affairs’ rather than history, but why on earth should our approach be any different?
None of us would consider a historical newspaper from one ‘side’ a reliable
source – so why should we think our own are any better today? Why are we so
sceptical about the propaganda of the 19th century – and apparently rarely
question that of the 21st?

But there are reasons, and here's just one example
to illustrate them:

The catalyst that toppled Kiev’s president and brought the
US and EU galloping into the fray was the shooting of upwards of 70 Maidan
protestors by the riot police – the ‘Berkut’. It was obviously intolerable for
a president to fire on his own people, and it was a wave of that understandable
outrage that swept the present ‘interim government’ into power.

As historians we're all familiar with the 'false flag' scenario, and if this had happened in 1814 rather than 2014 we'd all be happy to say this was one of them. But we can't say it NOW. Claim a ‘false flag’ in 1814 and we’re
historians – but claim one in 2014 and we’re ‘conspiracy theorists’. Historians
must be impartial, but to make such a comment when the event is still reverberating
is to be seen to take sides.

And that’s wrong. Truth doesn’t ‘take sides’ and neither
does history. My sympathy is entirely with the victims of Odessa, but that
doesn’t stop me recognizing that ethnic Russian separatists have also committed
atrocities of kidnapping, torture, and maybe even murder. I loathe the Odessa
murderers, but know there were also good people among the Ukrainian
nationalists, some of whom even erected scaffolding to try to rescue the
victims. Again it’s a case of ‘and-and’ rather than ‘either-or’, and to believe
one thing does not negate belief in another.

Odessans try to save victims from the fire

We can still speak out, without being ‘tribalists’ who only believe one side’s
version of events. If only we could all approach current affairs and history
with a genuinely impartial interest in truth, then info-wars and propaganda wouldn’t
stand a chance. Maybe news media would start to be more honest. Maybe some people would even reconsider what they're doing.

And maybe people wouldn’t be dying in Ukraine.

***
The website of the Very Not Communist A L Berridge can be found here.

10 comments:

Sorry - I can't "comment" as I need to go back and read and study this post in depth. Such a powerful piece: A historian's perspective that 24 hour "must be new" news rarely offers, to our detriment and ignorance. Thank you for taking the time to gather all these stories, all this evidence and all the footage and images together. I do hope this post gets the widest attention.

Such a deeply distressing situation. I've been trying to follow it and finding it so hard to find reliable reports. There was a very interesting (and disturbing) article in the Guardian and in an American paper about how the US are secretly extensively interfering in the situation in Ukraine, and how wrong it is to ascribe virtue to the US and evil to Putin, as he alone of world leaders has denonced the rise of the far-right in Europe, but when I went back to look at it again, all the links had been removed from social media. Which was disturbing in itself. There is absolutely no doubt we are fed stacks of propoganda here. Thank you for all the work you've put into this post, Louise.

I hardly dare say what a riveting article this is in the circumstances but it is, and an important one at that. The situation breaks my heart and when you look into similar situations globally, it's well-nigh impossible to see how such divisions can ever be resolved. Apart from tweeting, I'm going to share this on my personal FB. Thank you, Louise.

Thank you for compiling this information. It is important that we do not forget. The silence in the Western media is deafening.

There is one thing I didn't see mentioned so far. Several videos show how the people with the red armbands assemble in front of abuilding. A car from the OSCE is parked right there. Here is a video that shows the OSCE car (English subs): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoFPTrBDCfo

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